JHK’s Three-Act Play, Big Slide
A log mansion in the Adirondack Mountains…
A big family on the run…
A nation in peril…
Visit the Big Slide Page to order, perform, or see sample scenes.

Ho ho ho! It’s that time of year again. Here’s JHK’s holiday classic: A Christmas Orphan.

11-year-old Jeff Greenaway hears his mom and dad argue one night after an office Christmas party. He infers from their garbled squabble that he is an orphan, found in a willow basket on the welcome mat outside their New York apartment. Thinking now that his parents are imposters, he steals away to Grand Central Station and buys a train ticket to Drakesville, Vermont, where he intends to start life all over again.Print | Kindle | Kobo (Digital) | Barnes & Noble (Digital)

Celebrating the 20thth anniversary of the publication of The Geography of Nowhere (and release for the first time of an E-book edition), JHK yaks with New Urbanist Andres Duany about the campaign to create more walkable communities and places worth caring about. Duany came to the USA as a child from Cuba in the late 1950s. He got his architecture degrees from Princeton and Yale. He formed the firm DPZ in Miami with his wife Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and together they produced the most iconic projects of the New Urbanism (Seaside, Florida, and many others) as well as leading a movement to challenge and reform the suburban fiasco and all its governing regulations.

The KunstlerCast music is “Adam and Ali’s Waltz” from the recording Waiting to Fly by Mike and Ali Vass.

About James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

I particularly enjoyed Duany’s personal insight into our ever changing local, national and global architectural scene. His compassion for all people really comes through and that’s what makes good designs.

On the other hand, I feel the whole bike lane model is absurd. I was into it for a while as a poor 20 something, it has serious limitations. There’s a Carolina manufacturer addressing the limitations due to weather, safety and health; however, it still makes no sense to have a battery that requires 8 hours to recharge and only goes 20 mph (what if you have the average 30 mile commute?). This serves a very small minority of people and in the end it costs as much if not more than an economy car using 5$/gal gasoline.

Walk into any Wal-mart as the test case for battery operated short range transport. They can’t keep enough charged up due to our increasingly elderly and/or obese generation. It’s easier to work with open minded, young, healthy people as opposed to the geriatric and disabled that demand CODES to negotiate obstacles to daily civic life. Look at the numbers for the 21st century that show most people will be living in permanent dwellings and office buildings due to their age and health condition (elderly wave) along with necessity to retreat from the increasingly sever weather an hostile society. The 21st century young and middle aged adult will, in my opinion, be mobile, going from job to job, chasing the ever decreasing money supply due to energy costs. They will not be having babies and settling down until well into their 50s or 60s.

I’m not a nostalgic person; therefore, the idea of going back to recapture the pullulating city or town is ludicrous. Downtowns require capital to provide the services that sustain occupancy. Society continues to move onward and outward with no regard for communal troth. We do not live in a system that promotes altruism in towns nor can we make that a permanent feature of a town. Towns exist in order to conduct the most efficient and lucrative business. Everything else in the town is designed to support the functionality of trades (infrastructure, courts, housing, schools, etc.) Once a person trades whatever it is they have to offer, it goes out into the world and will be analyzed and replicated. Detroit, along with every other city and town, needs to get over its past history of leading in concepts and constructs and focus more on the present realities. Like Duany said, CNU has become a conventional organization in order to communicate their ideas to the city or town in which they can be the most effective.

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Too Much Magic

Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation

The nationally best-selling author of "The Long Emergency" expands on his alarming argument that our oil-addicted, technology-dependent society is on the brink of collapse—that the long emergency has already begun. Published by the Atlantic Monthly Press.